Coming events are said to cast their shadows. Some sci-fi moviemakers seem to have a talent for tapping into that level of the mass subconscious in which new concepts are in the formative stages, and bringing them into public consciousness. Typically, their films are instantly very popular, often unexpectedly, because the audiences, to the extent to which they also are in touch with the subconscious, respond with interest and enthusiasm without consciously understanding why.

Nothing is as inexorable as an idea whose time has come, and because film is such a powerful medium, nothing can precipitate it as quickly as a well-made movie that opens wide. It is the Hundreth Monkey principle accelerated to warp speed! Consequently these films usually become watershed events with permanent social effects.

Stanley Kubrick's 2001 - A Space Odyssey and Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind are clearly in this category. The Star Trek series has had such a profound social effect that it has actually evoked a sort of reverse nostalgia, a longing for the good new days! And now, a new star has appeared on the horizon.

MGM's recent film, Stargate has revived the old excitement. As with the others, somehow this movie struck a chord that resonated in the mass subconscious, and consequently has enjoyed a surprising box office bonanza. The sequel is already in production. The movie's success would appear to validate growing public interest, and belief in, the concept of ancient astronauts, a subject that has intrigued a small, but international, group of enthusiasts ever since the advent of Erich Von Daniken's book, Chariots of the Gods, in 1968.

Star Wars was the first popular film to address this milieu, claiming to have taken place a long time ago, on a planet far away. Then, the popular TV series, Battlestar Galactica picked up on the theme, portraying the adventures of a band of nomadic stellar expatriates heading for the new promised land, Earth, eventually to become our ancestors. In Stargate, an ancient stone ring, about 30 feet in diameter, unearthed by archaeologists at Giza in Egypt in 1928, is discovered, in the present day, to be a gate to inter-stellar travel.

When activated by a certain sequence of seven symbols, it permits travel through the gate. The Air Force takes over the project, and recruits an expert in hieroglyphics to decode the glyphs inscribed around the ring. He succeeds and they send through a probe and track its path all the way across the universe to a planet in another galaxy.

A small Special Forces expedition is assembled. They go through the gate and find themselves in what appears to be an abandoned temple in the middle of a desert. Two tall obelisks stand at the entrance. A duplicate of the Great Pyramid of Giza stands nearby.

While they know they are on a planet circling a distant star, the scene is very reminiscent of ancient Egypt. A huge spacecraft descends over the pyramid, and a youthful king, with his entourage, and bodyguards who resemble the Egyptian jackal-headed creatures, take residence in the temple.

It is Ra, the Sun God, he who rides in the Celestial Disk. Ra keeps the people of a nearby city terrorized by means of high technology. He has winged craft equipped with death rays, and his bodyguards carry cylindrical ray guns.

The people worship him as a god, and they are thus kept enslaved, working on mining operations. The story becomes predictable after this as the Earthlings, well acquainted with such problems, organize and lead the people and precipitate a revolution.

The film is obviously suggesting that this is essentially what happened in ancient Egypt, that Ra and the other gods were extraterrestrial who made a profound impression on the pre-dynastic Egyptians, who then memorialized a catalogue of religious rituals based on these early experiences. These rituals then eventually became solemn and sacred ceremonies carried out by the priests and pharaohs for thousands of years afterwards. According to at least one researcher, this scenario is uncannily close to the truth!

The Five Books of Zecharia

One of the foremost ancient astronaut theoreticians in the world today is Palestinian born Zecharia Sitchin. Sitchin is a walking Rosetta Stone, a multi-lingual scholar who acquired proficiency in ancient languages at an early age. He is the only investigator in this field in the world who reads ancient Sumerian, in addition to Hebrew, both ancient and modern, Greek and Aramaic, and who has developed high competency in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Sitchin has built a reputation for scrupulous and thorough scholarship and research, tempered with a healthy dose of intuition, a potent combination that gives his books an air of solid respectability and authority.

Based primarily on his deciphering of thousands of Sumerian clay tablets, Sitchin has written a series of five books called The Earth Chronicles in which he lays out an elaborate story about space travelers from a theoretical 10th planet (12th if the Sun and Moon are included) in the solar system, about four times the size of Earth, called Nibiru, or Marduk in Babylonian.

Sitchin claims that this planet has a very eccentric orbit whereby it travels from way out beyond Pluto, cutting across the orbits of the rest of the planets, and then half-circling the Sun between Mars and Jupiter, taking 3,600 Earth years for each revolution. On its closest orbital approach, about 450,000 years ago, a band of Nibiruans known as the Anunnaki, came to Earth and landed in southern Mesopotamia. They then proceeded to mine gold, which they evidently needed for the survival of their planet.

At first they extracted it from the Persian Gulf, but they couldn't obtain the quantities they needed that way, so they began underground mining in South Africa. The workers were not used to such backbreaking toil deep under the earth, and finally, after 40 Nibiru years, or 144,000 Earth years, they rebelled. This precipitated a visit to Earth by Anu, the Lord of Nibiru, and a meeting was convened to resolve the problem.

It was decided to genetically engineer a race of slave workers by crossing the ape-like creatures, then inhabiting Earth, with the Anunnaki. About 300,000 years ago, after a period of trial and error, they succeeded in achieving the perfect model of a primitive worker by implantation of the engineered embryo into the womb of a birth goddess. Then they went into mass production. Using a group of fourteen goddesses, they produced seven humans of each gender at a time, and put them to work in the mines when they reached adulthood.

At first they had to keep producing them because, as hybrids, they were sterile. But later, thanks to the experiments of Enki, the leader of the original expedition, they were able to develop a model that could reproduce.

Initially, the gods were angry at Enki for giving humans this gift, but they eventually realized the advantages. Sitchin claims that this was the basis of the Adam and Eve story, and the advent of the human race. As humans proliferated, the Anunnaki put them to work on a variety of jobs including building their houses, or temples.

Humans also cooked, danced and played music to entertain the gods. Such intimate fraternization ultimately led to the inevitable. The gods found the human females physically compatible and attractive and began to take them as wives. This explains the cryptic statement in Genesis, the sons of god went in unto the daughters of men, which is now more understandable since the females were also descendants of the gods.

This launched an era of Dionysian revelry by the gods, who acted much like drunken sailors in a foreign port, which their leaders found disturbing since it diluted their mission. Enlil, the Lord of the Earth, knew that the Antarctic ice cap would soon be plunged into the ocean because of Earth convulsions caused by the next approach of Nibiru. In order to end this orgy of miscegenation, it was decided to allow the human race to perish in the coming deluge while the Anunnaki orbited the Earth safely in their spacecraft. However, once again Enki came to the rescue of humanity, and secretly instructed the first human king, Ziusudra, in the construction of a submersible vessel. This, of course, is the Sumerian version of the story of Noah. The Advent of Ra.

Of Time and the Pyramids

There is now mounting evidence that the Giza pyramids are much older than the Fourth Dynasty, and that instead of having developed out of earlier primitive pyramids, they were actually the prototypes of the later pyramids, which were really pale imitations. They were clearly never used as tombs, and the technology displayed in their construction was much too advanced for the era of Khufu, about 2600 B.C., but very probably existed in the time of the gods.

Sitchin points out that the most convincing piece of evidence that Khufu did not build the Giza monuments is the so-called Inventory Stela found in the Temple of Isis near the Great Pyramid. The inscription by Khufu makes reference to the pyramid and Sphinx as already standing. And in The Stairway to Heaven Sitchin makes a very convincing case for the fact that the red paint quarry marks referring to Khufu, discovered in 1837 in the sealed chambers over the King's Chamber, were forgeries.

The Great Pyramid was built perfectly level and perfectly aligned with the four directions of the compass, with each side at a precise angle of 54 degrees. Says Sitchin, The wonderment only increases as one realizes the interior complexities and precision of the galleries, corridors, chambers, shafts and openings...the locking and plugging systems ... all in perfect alignment with each other... Consider what primitive equipment and tools were available in that period.

The Egyptians of that era did not have knowledge of the pulley, or block and tackle. All they had were wooden rollers and levers, and wood was at a premium in the desert.

Consider also the immense difficulty of transporting those 2.3 million 200-ton stones from the quarry all the way down the Nile at Aswan. If they cut, moved and placed ten stones per day, it would have taken 632 years to completion. The Great Pyramid still remains the largest stone structure in the world, and probably could not be duplicated today.

But for the Anunnaki, it was probably not such a difficult feat. Ra's father, Ptah or Enki, was known as an engineering genius, and Ra is said to have enlisted the assistance of Thoth, the Egyptian god of sciences and of magical powers. This suggests that the Anunnaki might have had the ability to move the massive stones around without benefit of manpower.

The Pharaoh's Journey to the Stars

Robert Bauval, a construction engineer working in the Middle East, had always been fascinated by the sophisticated astronomical knowledge of the ancient Egyptians, and how it was incorporated into their religious ritual.

As the god king, each pharaohh was considered to be the personification of Horus, the son of Osiris. According to the Pyramid Texts, the only authentic source of information, the purpose of the whole process of mummification and the accompanying rites was to prepare the pharaoh for a journey to heaven in the stars, specifically Orion, there to rejoin his father Osiris and to become a star in that constellation, as he was.

To help in this journey, the priests would frequently paint star maps on the insides of the coffin lids, or on the ceilings of the tombs. Live and be young beside your father, beside Orion in the sky says Pyramid Text 2180. About 1954, an Egyptologist named Badawy advanced the theory that the shafts in the Great Pyramid were not for ventilation at all, but were pointed towards certain star systems, and had some religious significance.

After making corrections for precession, he determined that around 2600 B.C., the time of Khufu, the southern shaft pointed directly at the belt of Orion, making it very likely that some ritual was probably performed in the King's Chamber involving the flight of the soul of the pharaoh through the shaft to Orion.

Bauval, who had always wondered why the three pyramids at Giza were aligned the way they were, was intrigued when he came across Badawy's data. He began to believe that there was some correlation between Orion and the building scheme at Giza. He pored over aerial photographs seeking some clue.

Then, one night in November of 1983, on an overnight camping trip in the desert dunes near Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, he woke up around 3 A.M. and gazed at the stellar canopy above, so crystal clear he could almost touch it.

He awoke his friend Jean-Pierre and they observed and discussed the Milky Way, Orion and Sirius. Then Jean-Pierre pointed out how the third star in Orion's belt was smaller and slightly out of alignment with the other two. In a flash Bauval realized that the three pyramids at Giza were a replication on Earth of the three stars in Orion's belt! He then perceived that the Orion stars were in approximately the same relation to the Milky Way, which resembles a great river in the sky, as the Giza pyramids were to the Nile.

This was a momentous discovery, fraught with implications for both Egyptologists and ancient astronaut theorists alike. It indicated a grand plan at Giza far beyond the capability of Pharaoh Khufu. And if Ra was the builder of the pyramids, this would connect him with Orion in some way.

Bauval's breakthrough is discussed in detail in his new book, The Orion Mystery (Crown, 1994) penned with co-author Adrian Gilbert. Bauval then went on to study precession, and discovered that Orion made its first appearance over the horizon at Giza in 10,400 B.C., almost exactly when Sitchin claimed that Ra had built the Giza pyramids!

Sitchin never mentioned him (and Bauval never mentions Sitchin), but Bauval points out that famous clairvoyant Edgar Cayce also claimed that very same date to be the beginning of the design phase of the Great Pyramid. With a scientist/engineer, an anthropologist/linguist, and a clairvoyant adding their voices of concurrence, the case for the antiquity of the Giza pyramids and Sphinx seems impressive.

And so it appears that somehow Stargate has tapped into a vision of the distant past that no respectable anthropologist, archeologist or Egyptologist has ever painted, or would even dare to entertain. It has brought us the true story of Ra, the Star God, He of the Winged Globe. I guess if you want to learn the truth about the past, or to see into the future, you have to go to the movies. Pass the popcorn, please.